Smooth Sailing in Classic Blues for Hammond

Economists like to say that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” which is small comfort at a time when the country seems stuck on a sandbar, waiting uncertainly for the waves to return.

The tide has been coming in lately, however, for tradition-minded blues musicians. John Hammond, for one, has been enjoying the sailing.

“More than ever, it’s been going really well for me,” the 49-year-old performer said in a phone interview Tuesday from Glendale.

Whether his career has been going well or just going along, Hammond has long occupied a niche as the finest and most persistent modern interpreter of the solo-acoustic blues tradition that harks back to such founding fathers as Robert Johnson and Son House.

The New York City native is known for kinetic performances that cut to the primal emotions of the blues in their most basic form. Playing mostly classic material, Hammond goes at his work with voice moaning, harmonica wailing, feet stomping and fingers and metal slide bar stinging and swarming in unpredictable cadences along his fret-board.

Nowadays, Hammond said, he is able to bring that arsenal to bear on an expanding audience. Hammond currently is playing big venues opening for Neil Young (including a show Friday night at the Pacific Amphitheatre), and he is enjoying success with “Got Love If You Want It,” his first album on a major label since 1975.

Both the tour and the recording opportunity stem from longstanding relationships developed in a career that started 30 years ago, when Hammond quit college and headed to Los Angeles to make his living as a blues player.

Hammond said his connection with Neil Young goes back to 1969, when Young, then barely beginning his solo career, opened a show for Hammond at the Cellar Door club in Washington. They became friends, Hammond said, and they did an extensive tour together in 1970, with the folkie and the blues man each performing solo. “That kind of established our relationship,” said Hammond. “Eight years ago, he called me up and asked if I’d be on some gigs with him in the Northeast. Every now and then in the last four years, I’ll get a call from him, and we’ll be on some shows together.”

Opening for Young, Hammond knows he is playing for people who may have a sweet tooth for “Sugar Mountain” and “Cinnamon Girl” but not necessarily a taste for traditional blues.

“I don’t change because of the audience. I do what I do; I just play what I feel like playing, and it seems to be going very well,” he said, in speaking tones that can sound as cottony and subtly modulated as his singing voice.

As for Hammond’s recording return to the majors, it’s a case of that rising blues tide lifting him too.

One of the most remarkable developments in pop music over the past few years has been the commercial success of John Lee Hooker’s recent albums, “The Healer” (1989) and “Mr. Lucky” (1991). The septuagenarian blues veteran’s wave has helped buoy Hammond’s fortunes.

“I’ve worked a lot of gigs with John Lee over the years, going back to ’62 and ’63. We’re friends, and he asked me if I’d like to be on his album,” Hammond said. He appeared on two tracks from “Mr. Lucky,” sparking some interest in Hammond by Hooker’s record company, the blues-oriented Point Blank/Charisma label.

Around the same time, Hammond shared a concert bill with J.J. Cale, the rootsy singer-songwriter-guitarist best known for writing two of Eric Clapton’s biggest hits, “Cocaine” and “After Midnight.”

“After the show, he said, ‘I really dig your stuff, and I’d like to produce an album for you,’ ” Hammond said. Cale’s interest in producing Hammond whetted Point Blank’s interest in putting out the resulting album. “All of a sudden, it was like the magic name. They didn’t just bite; they chomped on it,” Hammond said.

After having put out four albums during the ‘80s on the independent Rounder and Flying Fish labels, Hammond figured, “Here was my chance to have a label behind me that would actually promote what I was doing. I wanted this album to be really representative of who I am and where I’ve been.”

Hammond mixed tracks done in his accustomed solo format with material done with bands--either Little Charlie & the Nightcats, the Sacramento blues band he has frequently performed with, or a band of Cale’s cronies that included session aces Tim Drummond and Spooner Oldham. Hooker sat in on one track.

Hammond drew most of the album’s material from seminal sources like Son House, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter--as well as doing a moaning, slinky cover of Chuck Berry’s “Nadine.” The surprise track on the album is “No One Can Forgive Me But My Baby,” a Tom Waits tune penned expressly for Hammond.

“Tom was hanging out at the session (which took place in San Francisco). I believe he wrote the song right there, or the day before,” Hammond said. “I’ve known Tom a long time, and I was touched that he’d done that for me. It was a badass song. Because I do a lot of tunes like ‘Who Do You Love?’ (with its classic tough-guy braggadocio), he decided he was going to write a real badass song.”

The Waits tune, one of the few Hammond has recorded by writers outside the classic blues tradition, paints a character whose proudly unrepentant stance is matched only by the magnitude of his sins:

I took a hundred dollars from a blind man’s hands,

I slept with the whores on the burning sand.

Got 27 children I never seen,

Got blood on my hands that will never come clean.

Hammond, in his solo performance, gives it a dark, driven desperation--which is a far cry from the not-so-blue outlook he projects when not singing the blues.

“This year has been a real step up for me,” he said. “There have been big sales in Europe, the album is in the black, and I’m very pleased. There’s been promotion and the kind of support from the label I haven’t had before, even in the years (during the ‘60s and ‘70s) when I was with Columbia and Atlantic and Capricorn.”

Hammond’s own fortunes are improving at a time when the music of his inspirations, the great acoustic blues masters like Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton, has never been more readily available, due to a series of compact-disc reissues. Last year, a duo of British documentary producers called on Hammond to serve as host and narrator for a film, “The Search for Robert Johnson.” The 72-minute piece recently was issued as a home video.

“It won’t die; they can’t kill it. They tried. God knows, in the ‘70s they X-ed blues off the airwaves, and big labels axed all their blues-oriented artists. But the Robert Johnson boxed set changed everything,” Hammond said, referring to Johnson’s “The Complete Recordings,” issued by Columbia in 1990.

“That gave a new focus for the record industry in general. Its almost immediate worldwide success made everybody go: ‘Geez, there’s a lot of blues clubs all over the place that we didn’t even notice.’ All these years, I’ve never been out of work.”

Johnson’s resurgence marks a sort of circle completion for Hammond, who cites the Delta blues great as his own key inspiration. Hammond’s father was the renowned record producer and talent scout John Henry Hammond (the blues man isn’t a “Jr.” because his middle name is Paul). Hammond had heard folk-blues from Leadbelly and Josh White as a youngster and had tuned in to R & B and electric Chicago blues in his teens.

“In 1957 I heard the early Robert Johnson (recordings), and it really made things come very sharply into focus,” he said. “I wanted to know everything about this guy and his contemporaries. It led me up a path I’m still on.”

John Hammond plays with Neil Young and James on Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. $10, $28.05, $30.25, $55. (714) 979-5944.

ARENA ROCK: “The Arena,” a new TV show focusing on the Southern California hard-rock scene, will debut Friday at 11:30 p.m. on Anaheim’s KDOC-TV Channel 56. The debut program features Filthy Lucre, a new band led by the singer and drummer from L.A. Guns. The hourlong variety show, developed by Anaheim-based Nitro Productions, also features comedy segments, political satire, rock videos and interviews with musicians. Brenda Knapp, a Nitro spokeswoman, said that plans call for “The Arena” to begin airing weekly starting in mid-October.